Conservatives, Liberals Don't See Eye-to-Eye, Literally

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If you walk away from holiday dinners fuming that conservative
Uncle Morton just can't see your point of view, or that liberal
Aunt Betty just doesn't get it, a new finding may make it easier
to cool your jets. According to the study, conservatives and
liberals pay attention to their environments differently, meaning
the two sides of the political spectrum quite literally don't see
eye-to-eye.

Conservatives pay more attention to negative stimuli compared
with liberals, the study found.

"They're essentially monitoring things that make them feel
uncomfortable, which does feel fairly consistent with
conservative policies, actually," study researcher Mike Dodd, a
psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, told
LiveScience. "They tend to confront things head-on that they view
as threats, things like immigration and so on." [ 10
Significant Political Protests ]

Dodd was quick to note that the kind of stimuli a person pays
more attention to does not make them better or worse than someone
of another political persuasion. But the findings could suggest a
biological basis for
political views.

"Based on your biology, you might be experiencing and processing
something in a fundamentally different way from someone else,"
Dodd said.

The idea that a person's innate biology might play into how they
vote is relatively new. But researchers at the University of
Nebraska and elsewhere have been uncovering a series of clues
suggesting that political preference is somewhat influenced by
biology. Conservatives are
more squeamish than liberals, these scientists have found,
while liberals pay more attention to the
eye movements of others compared with conservatives.

These differences are at the
level of reflexes and rely on extremely basic brain processes
such as attention. Although the researchers can't prove that
biology influences political beliefs and not the other way
around, Dodd said there's good reason to believe that biology
comes first and beliefs second.

"It's quite unlikely that just because you've adopted some sort
of political temperament, that's going to change basic
cognition," Dodd said. "I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just
saying it makes more sense the other way around."

In the new study, Dodd and his colleagues had 48 adults who were
strongly conservative or strongly liberal look at a series of
33 pictures. Some of the pictures were pleasant, such as that of
a fluffy bunny. Others, including a picture of a maggot-infested
wound and another of a man with a spider on his face, were
downright disgusting.

While the participants looked at the photos, researchers
monitored their skin conductance, a measure of minute changes in
sweating that reveals how excited and emotional someone feels, in
this case, about a given image. They found that, consistent with
other studies, conservatives responded more strongly to the
negative images.

In a second experiment, the researchers repeated the procedure
with images of polarizing politicians, including Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush. Again, they found a political difference:
Conservatives responded more strongly to politicians they
disagreed with, such as Clinton, than they did to politicians
they liked. Liberals, on the other hand, had a stronger
physiological reaction to politicians they agreed with than they
did to politicians they disliked.

Paying attention

But knowing that someone has a strong reaction to something tells
you little about what they do about that reaction. It's possible
that conservatives might look away from things that disgust them,
Dodd said. Or they might pay more attention to disgusting
things because they're cuing into potential threats. To find
out, the researchers created collages of positive and negative
images and set up an eye-tracking device to follow where
participants' gazes fell. They then had 76 college students look
at the collages.

"Conservatives would orient to those negative things pretty much
twice as fast, and they would spend quite a lot longer looking at
them relative to the liberals, who preferred more positive
things," Dodd said. He and his colleagues reported the findings
today (Jan. 22) in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society B.

The findings provide extra evidence that basic biology may play a
role in political choices, Dodd said. Of course, not every
country has a liberal-conservative split like the United States.
Most likely, Dodd said, you'd see a similar difference between
more right-wing and more left-wing people, but the size of that
difference might be smaller.

"I'm Canadian, and I would say that our right is actually fairly
liberal in many regards," Dodd said. "So I think you would still
expect to find some differences there, but I think it's a
question of what the magnitude of those differences are."

Biology isn't destiny, Dodd added, and basic brain processes
certainly interact with experiences and culture to influence
politics. Nonetheless, he hopes the study will help
cool political tempers.

"What we're showing here is that people just don't see things the
same, even if it's the same thing," Dodd said. "I do think
there's a nice potential here to move beyond stereotypes."